This invention relates to the construction of structures made from interlocking elements or subassemblies that can be fabricated and shipped as components and assembled together on-site for temporary or permanent use. Examples of applications include but are not limited to barricades, barrier reefs, berms, buildings, bunkers, culverts, dams, facades, fencing, fish ladders, foundations, jetties, levees, planters, reinforcement walls, retaining walls, retention ponds, revetments, roadways, sand dunes, scaffolds, seawalls, shoring, shorelines, snow fences, space stations, and streambeds. Examples of fields of use include, but are not limited to agriculture, architecture, civil engineering, construction, emergency management, flood control, horticulture, land management, land reclamation and recovery, military defense, mining, ocean and sea management, shorelines, and water management.
When fabricating such structures in the field it is desirable to have components that are as light as possible and can pack together as easily as possible. Since one wants to ship as little air as possible, it is a benefit to have components that can be packed flat or that nest together and take their final shape when the structure is assembled. To save shipping weight, there is an advantage if some of the bulk can be added from local materials, such as fillers made from water, sand, soil, gravel, concrete or other inorganic or organic substances available near the construction site. Another approach is to have the components be made using simple technologies available almost everywhere, such as the casting of concrete.
It is also desirable to be able to build such structures in varying sizes, shapes, and three-dimensional configurations using as few different components as possible. It is further desirable that such structures require a minimum of skill in the field during the assembly process.
This disclosure presents an approach for building such structures by to placing rhomboid-shaped inserts into hexagonal tubes in an interlocking configuration that can scale from as few as two tubes and five inserts to as large of a structure as might be needed.
In the appended figures, similar components and/or features may have the same reference label. For items with the same reference label, the description is applicable to any one Of the similar components.